A new method for verifying text areas detected in video streams is proposed. The algorithm explores the spectral properties of the horizontal projection of candidate text regions in order to reduce the high amount of false alarms that most text detection algorithms suffer from. The full algorithm (text localization followed by verification and temporal redundancy module) has been tested on newscast video sequences (MPEG-1-720 x 576 resolution-184 minutes). The detection module produced 94.82% recall rate but only 51.84% precision rate. The addition of the verification module increased the precision rate to 78.93% keeping the recall rate almost unaffected.